“Thank you for the information, Anne-Line Svendsen. It’s been a great help. I think that’ll be all for now, and pardon the intrusion.” Pasg?rd got up before his assistant. “We’ll be checking up on Patrick Pettersson’s movements over the last few weeks. That should be simple enough if his boss has kept his paperwork up to date.”
Anneli tried to contain her relief. “Oh, I forgot to mention that Michelle Hansen and Patrick Pettersson were planning to go on holiday. That was one of the reasons Michelle came in to see me. Of course, I couldn’t give permission when I had just discovered her fraud. But he might not have been at work lately.”
The other policeman whistled and looked knowingly at Pasg?rd.
Poor Patrick Pettersson.
“Anne-Line, I’m devastated that you’ve been through all this without speaking to me. It was really embarrassing for me that you had to expose yourself like that. I’m terribly sorry.”
Anneli nodded. If she played her cards right, she could probably get a few more days off out of this.
“You don’t have to apologize. It was my own fault. You never know how you’re going to react before you actually get ill, do you? So I’m the one who needs to apologize. I should have told you everything. I can see that now.”
Her manager smiled, looking touched. It was the first time that had ever happened.
“Well, why don’t we put that behind us and move on. I can understand you, Anne-Line. I certainly don’t think I would have been able to deal with everyone getting involved if I was in your shoes.” She smiled, still looking sheepish. “Are you all right?” she added.
“Thank you. I’m a little tired, but I’m doing okay.”
“Take things easy until you feel better, okay? Let’s agree on that. Just let reception know if you need a day to yourself, okay?”
Anneli tried to look touched. Feelings like those were always better if you shared them.
Emotional bonding, she believed they called it.
34
Friday, May 27th, 2016
Whose damn idea was it to leave so early? Wasn’t it Assad’s? he asked himself as they were driving south. Now the unshaven bandit had been snoring next to him for the last one hundred and fifty kilometers. The cheek!
“Wake up, Assad!” he yelled, causing the guy to hit his forehead against his knees.
Assad looked around, appearing disoriented. “What are we doing here?” he asked drowsily.
“We’re halfway there, and I’ll fall asleep if you don’t speak to me.”
Assad rubbed his eyes and looked up at the signs above the glistening wet motorway. “Are we only in Odense? I think I’ll take another nap, then.”
Carl elbowed him in the side, which still didn’t stop him from nodding off again.
“Hey, wake up, Assad. I’ve been thinking about something. Listen up.”
Assad sighed.
“I went to see my ex-mother-in-law yesterday. She’ll be ninety soon and has become strange and withdrawn, and yet she wants to involve me in something new every time I see her.”
“You’ve mentioned this before, Carl,” he said, closing his eyes.
“Yes, but yesterday she wanted me to teach her to take selfies.”
“Hmm!”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I think so.”
“I was thinking that Michelle Hansen’s phone must be full of photos. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d taken selfies with the girls who committed the robbery. That is, if it’s true that she was an accomplice.”
“You seem to forget that it’s not our case, Carl. Anyway, the phone was smashed. A total write-down, Carl.”
“Write-off, Assad. But that doesn’t matter. It was an iPhone.”
Assad reluctantly opened his eyes and looked at Carl sleepily. “You mean . . .”
“Yes. Everything can be found in the cloud. Or on her computer or iPad or whatever we can find. Or on Instagram or Facebook or . . .”
“Don’t you think the team has already figured that out?”
Carl shrugged. “Probably. Terje Ploug is on the ball with most things, but maybe we should give him a heads-up. What do you say?”
Carl nodded to himself and turned to face Assad. The big lump had fallen asleep again.
—
After years with Vigga and more than his fair share of years on the streets surrounded by prostitutes and pimps, Carl thought he’d built up a fairly good level of tolerance, but as he stood in Kinua von Kunstwerk’s raw gallery down at the harbor in Flensburg, his open-mindedness was put to the test. You couldn’t exactly call it porn, but it was a close call. The enormous walls were covered in huge and extremely detailed clinical depictions of female genitalia in bright colors.
Carl caught a glimpse of Assad’s bulging eyes as an extraordinary woman waltzed into the room wearing an outfit that perfectly illustrated her eccentricity. Like a bird of paradise, she walked toward them in her ultrahigh heels, and Carl saw that Rose had certainly retained some influence from her childhood friend.
“Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome, my friends,” she said loudly enough that the suspiciously engrossed visitors in the gallery couldn’t avoid noticing her entrance.
She kissed Carl and Assad on both cheeks a few times too many for normal north German standards. Carl was worried that Assad would fall to his knees as she stared at them alluringly with her big brown eyes.
“Are you okay?” he whispered to make sure when he saw the veins pumping on Assad’s neck, but Curly didn’t answer. Instead, he invested all his energy in squinting at the woman as if he were looking directly at the sun.
“We spoke on the phone,” said Assad in a voice so smooth that it would give a Spanish crooner a run for his money.
“It’s about Rose,” interrupted Carl before the sultry mood completely took over.
Karoline, alias Kinua, nodded with a look of concern. “Yes, it doesn’t sound like she’s doing too well,” she said.
Carl glanced over at a promising-looking Nespresso machine, placed on a glass display cabinet underneath a scarlet-and-purple painting of a vagina during labor.
“Do you have somewhere else we could talk?” asked Carl, slightly distracted. “With a cup of coffee, that is. It’s been a long drive from Copenhagen.”
—
Surrounded by the less invasive decor of the office, the self-proclaimed artistic icon assumed a more normal demeanor.
“Yes, it’s been several years since Rose and I lost touch, which is a real shame because we were really good friends, but also very different.” She stared straight ahead for a moment, lost in her memories, and then nodded. “And we have very different careers that take up a lot of our time.”
Carl understood. She didn’t need to underline that difference.
“As you have probably figured out, we really need to get to the core of Rose’s current situation,” he said. “Perhaps you can provide us with a bit more detail about what happened with Rose and her dad? We know that he tyrannized her and that it must have been bad. But what did he do exactly? Can you give us some examples?”
Karoline looked surprisingly normal while she tried to find a way to put her thoughts into words.
“Examples?” she finally said. “How much time do you have?”
Carl shrugged.
“Just fire away,” said Assad.